An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Dave Van Ronk—The Missing Link

Classic Van Ronk at the Cafe Lena.

In
the popular mythology the American folk music scene passed from
the hills of Appalachia and Mississippi Delta cotton fields to Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, The Almanacs, and
The Weavers and then, after an
interim of nearly a decade was transmitted by the dying Guthrie and lanky sage Pete Seeger directly to the new avatars—Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez,
Bob Dylan, et al. Usually left out is the defiantly bohemian and countercultural scene of New
York’s Greenwich Village—usually thought of as the exclusive home of the Beats and Jazz—and the genial giant of a man who helped create and nurture a
new folk music that tradition but encouraged innovation within it.

Dave Van Ronk was literally a
towering figure in American folk music but is almost unknown to all but the
most hard core folkies. There have been blips of renewed interest in him, all confined to
relatively rarified intellectual circles.
First there was his highly readable and entertaining posthumously published memoir, The Mayor of McDougal Street which finished
by his friend and fellow folk singer Elijah
Wald was published in 2005. That, in
turn, inspired the 2013 film by Joel
and Ethan Coen, Inside Llewyn Davis. That
film won praise for its portrayal of the Greenwich Village scene, but criticism
from Van Ronk’s friends because the title character based on him was radically
different than the man himself.

He
was born as David Kenneth Ritz Van Ronk
in Brooklyn on June 30, 1936. Despite his last name, he had just enough Dutch genes to connect him viscerally
to New York back to its founding era.
Mostly he was Irish, a descendent of the hordes of despised immigrants of the 19th Century. His working class family had risen only
moderately and then were set back by the Great
Depression. They moved to Queens and put their son into the
heavily Irish Holy Child Jesus Catholic
School. Despite or because of a keen intellect and inquiring mind he dropped out of school before graduation.

By
17 he was on his own and drifted to the Village, a very scruffy place in those
days, but hospitable to various fringes. He supportedhimself with odd jobs
like dishwashing and shipped out three times as a merchant seaman. It was while hanging around the Village that
he was exposed to folk music at the weekly Sunday gatherings and sing-a-longs
in Washington Square Park. He was soon joining in with his own guitar,
learning a vast repertoire of songs
and honing his skills

Van
Ronk was already interested in music, but not so much in the Big Band sound and crooners who dominated the radio. Instead he was instinctively drawn to music
of earlier eras. In 1949 he began
singing in barber shop quartets. When he became interested in the revival of traditional New Orleans style jazz, he picked up the tenor banjola—an instrument with the neck of a 5-string banjo and the body of
a mandolin. He was soon playing professionally around
town in traditional bands—popularly labeled Dixieland, a name disparaged by most of its practitioners.

That
inevitably led to an interest in rag
time, which he began to interpret on the guitar “as if it were a piano. He created guitar arrangement for rag
classics like St. Louis Tickle and Scott
Joplin’sMaple Leaf Rag which brought him as a solo act the Village coffee
house scene.

Van Ronk at the beginning of his career.

Van
Ronk’s life and music really changed when he discovered traditional blues while rifling through the platters at a used record shop. The
vitality and music and its authenticity immediately grabbed him. His most important influence was Rev. Gary Davis but he was also
influenced by Furry Lewis, Mississippi John Hurt, and Brownie McGee. Other white singers, including Seeger,
had dabbled in the blues, but Van Ronk was the first to inhabit the music with
complete naturalness. His deep, husky
voice and ability to wail were perfect.
His respect for the music was total.

By the late ‘50’s Van Ronk was
already the leading figure in the somewhat provincial world of Village folk
music. Although blues were a particular
forte, his performances were filled with all kinds of genre-busting music—those
pure old Appalachian Childe Ballads,
sea shanties, tunes, jazz, old time
popular and vaudeville music, and topical ballads. He mastered them all. He even had a record deal with Folkways which guaranteed a bit of
prestige but not big selling popular success.

He had established residence in
the rambling apartment on Sheridan
Square where he lived for the rest of his life. It was open to all of his many friends for jams or a place to crash on the couch which
hosted many notable, including Dylan for most of his first year in New
York. When he wasn’t playing in coffee houses, he sat in the audience to support his friends or hung
out drinking Tullamore Dew and
playing the raconteur the customers
at saloons like McSorley’s. His
appetite for all things, food, drink, women, life itself was insatiable.

Van Ronk was also curious. Despite his lack of formal
education, he read widely, deeply, and seriously. He was interested, naturally, in history, but he also taught himself to be agourmet cook, collected native artfrom New Guinea and the Pacific Northwest.
He enjoyed science fictionand even contributed his own
original stories to fanzineslater in
life. Many thought that they were good
enough to have found a more professional home.

Radical, even revolutionary politics, was a particular
passion. He shunned the doctrinaire Communistsand former Communists who had
long dominated the Village radicalism.
On one hand he was offended by their slavish attachment to the Moscow line of the momenton the other hand he found them both stodgy and renderedtimidby the traumas of the Red Scare. For a while
his friend Roy Berkley, the Trotskyite Troubadour, brought him into the orbit of
the American Committee for the Fourth International (ACFI), later renamed the Workers League, dissident Trotskyite
sect.

But Van Ronk was at heart an anarchist and a syndicalist.He became active in and a leading
member of the Libertarian League—not to be confused with the current right
wing use of
the word with anarchist luminaries like Sam Dolgoff and Murray
Bookchin. The Libertarian League promoted
“equal freedom for all in a
free socialist society.” Dolgoff
introduced him to the Industrial Workers
of the World (IWW), the famed
but then faded revolutionary union. He
took out a Red Card and became prominent
among younger members in the New York
Branch. In 1959 he and fellow Wobbly Richard Ellington collaborated on the fabled
satire, The Boss’s Song Book. Van
Ronk kept up his IWW dues for the rest of his life.

In the ‘60’s and after he
performed at numerous benefits for
the peace movement and civil rights, but his anarchism was not
welcomed by some elders and caused friction with others, including Pete Seeger
with whom he was sometimes at odds and never close to despite their similar
interests. In one of his most famous
activist moments, Van Ronk helped Phil
Ochs organize the 1974 An Evening
For Salvador Allende to protest the bloody coup d’état that
overthrew and killed the Socialist
Chilean President.

With Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo in 1963.

At the end of the ‘60’s groups
like the Kingston Trio and the Chad Mitchell Trio emerged off of college campuses and began selling records like rock stars.
That drew the attention of major
labels to the Village folk scene in search of new talents, and in turn
lured youngsters from across the country—and Canada to try their hand in the scruffy coffee houses and
clubs. Van Ronk welcomed them and
mentored them, most famously Bob Dylan.
Despite the mythology of the extremely ill Woody Guthrie passing his baton to the kid from Minnesota, Van Ronk was his real mentor, friend, and promoter. He likewise helped Ochs, Tom Paxton, and Joni Mitchell. Up in Cambridge teenage Joan Baez idolized him. All of these people, and other friends went on
to greater popular success. Van Ronk did
not begrudge them, but did wish that he could do the same. He moved to the more pop oriented Verve label and his albums sold
modestly, but steadily. He was held back
by his reluctance to long leave his beloved Village, which by this time had
bestowed the unofficial title of the
Mayor of McDougal Street. He might dash off for a weekend festival
or for a quick trip up to Cambridge and Boston, but he would not, for the most
part, tour extensively, which was necessary to bring his music to a wider
audience.

Once, when Chicago, was making its bid to be a second front for folk music, Van Ronk took his famous trip to the Windy City audition at the famous Gate of Horn where Bob Gibson, Hamilton Camp, Josh
White, and others were making their mark.
Inexplicably, the club turned him down, a bitter disappointment. The experience became a central part of the
Coen Brother’s film.

Van Ronk often seemed to have
just plain bad luck, narrowly missing opportunities to break out into national
stardom. In 1961 he was the first choice
of managerAlbert Grossman for the folk/pop
trio he was trying to put together Peter
Yarrow and Mary Travers. But Grossman decided that Van Ronk was
too idiosyncratic, independent, and his voice not sweet enough for the sound he
envision. Instead Noel Stookey became Paul.

His pal Bob Dylan recorded his
arrangement of the old New Orleans blues House of the Rising Sun without his
permission and before he could record it himself. He saw the same arrangement become a huge hit
for The Animals. Dylan’s casual betrayal temporarily
cooled their relationship, although they reconciled.

In 1964 was asked to form a jug
band to cash in on the popularity of Jim
Kweskin and enlisted some of the best and most versatile pickers in the
city for the project including, Sam
Charters, Barry Kornfield, Artie Rose, and Danny Kalb. Despite the
talented line up and glowing reviews Dave Van Ronk and the Ragtime Jug Stompers failed to become
a hit.

His electric folk/rock album.

It was not Van Ronk’s last stab at a band. In 1967 with Kornfield this time as producer
he formed an electric—and eclectic—folk rock band called Dave van
Ronk and the Hudson Dusters. The
song selection was all over the place—the kitschy ‘50’s novelty rock
song Ally Oop, Jimmy Van Heusen’s Swing on a Star, Dink’s Song as
collected and arranged by Bess and Allen Lomax, and Rev. Gary
Davis’s Cocaine. But the album
also contained versions of two songs by a young favorite—Joni Mitchell—Chelsea
Morning and Both Sides Now, which Van Ronk had renamed,
to Mitchell’s displeasure Clouds. She
had not yet recorded either song and was herself not well known. Despite her resentment over the title switch,
Mitchell always said that the cut on this record was her favorite version of
her most iconic song. Once again,
critics were impressed and the album sold moderately well, but did not break
out. The band dissolved, Verve dropped
him and Van Ronk returned to solo work.

He did not issue another album until 1971, the
simply titled Van Ronk for Polydor. This album included more Mitchell, Leonard
Cohn’sBird on the Wire, Randy Newman’s I Think It’s Going to
Rain Today, Jacques Brell’s The
Port of Amsterdam, Bertolt Brecht’s Legend of the Dead Soldier,
as well as two rare—for him—original songs.
It was a moody, moving masterpiece growled with deep emotion that ended
with the ironic choice of Johnny Mercer’s and Harold Arlen’s Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate
the Positive. Another critical darling the public didn’t
get.

On
last near miss was his discovery of the song The Gambler by country music songwriter Don
Schlitz. He recognized it as a potential
hit. But his current label, Philo, was
both dedicated to a hard core folk audience and unwilling to promote a
single. Van Ronk had to take a
pass. In 1979, of course Kenny Rogers--previously
a mid-pack country singer—broke out to superstardom and a No. 1 hit on
three Billboard Charts.

By
this time the Folk revival had long petered out. Many of his friends and the musicians he had
mentored left the Village for Woodstock, California, and Nashville. Van Ronk, viscerally attached to the city
and Village, refused to follow them. He
remained the Mayor of McDougal Street, but it was not the same.

On the
eve of his birthday, June 28, 1969 Van Ronk was drinking with friends when he
went outside the bar to find out what kind of disturbance was going on. He found police and the Gay Patrons
of the Stonewall Inn in a near pitch battle following a vice
raid. Ever ready to lend a hand to
the underdog and oppressed, he joined the melee. A towering, burly man with a leonine
head of hair and shaggy beard, he became a target for the cops who
over powered him and dragged him inside the Inn to be arrested. He was charged with throwing a rock at
police, which he denied. He was one of
13 arrested on the first night of the rebellion which became the
rallying cry of the Gay Liberation Movement.

Van Ronk and first wife and manager Terri Thall.

Van Ronk lived with Terri Thal for
11 years, the last 7 as husband and wife after they met in
1957. She became his manager and
accomplice, and also was the first manager for Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton and
others. After they parted on amicable
terms, he had another long term relationship before marrying Andrea Vuocolo in 1988. They remained devoted the rest of his life.

Despite waning fame, and eventually health problems, Van Ronk never
really retired. He continued to perform
where he could and made more albums. He
had a small but devoted following. Old
friends like Dylan would occasionally visit his old apartment. His last public concert was inAtlanta, not New York City, a few months before his
death.

On February 10, 2002 he died ofheart failurein a New York City hospitalfollowing surgery for colon
cancer.

Two years later in perhaps the tribute that would have meant the most to
him, the block the street in front of his long-time apartment was officially
named Dave Van Ronk Street.